English Language and Literature Commons^™

A Case Study Of Events And Examples : History In Arundhati Roy's The God Of Small Things, Michell C. Smith

Honors Theses

No abstract provided.

Only In Story A World : Atheistic Metanarrative In Leguin, Pullman And Wolfe, Samuel N. Keyes

Honors Theses

Ursula K. Le Guin, Philip Pullman, and Gene Wolfe, despite their apparent ideological as well as stylistic differences, all profoundly question the way modernity has divided knowledge, posing serious challenges to contemporary distinctions between religion, science and magic. Moreover, they share a common concern for the power of narrative to accomplish this critique.

In each of their multivolume fantasies, the differences between the categories of science and religion become meaningless. After such a deconstruction, the possibility of nihilism looms unless a new system of meaning surfaces. The move away from discrete areas of science and religion, therefore, in these works …

The "Beyondness Of Things" In The Buccaneers: Vernon Lee's Influence On Edith Wharton's Sense Of Places, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

Since its publication in 1938, readers have been at odds in their assessment of The Buccaneers, Edith Wharton's only novel set in England. While her literary executor, Gaillard Lapsley, and many early reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic saw great promise in the unfinished novel, a few critics like Edmund Wilson wrote the work off as 'an old-fashioned story for girls' and judged Wharton's skill 'dulled' in this her last book. In the 1980's, however, feminist critics found much to value in the novel: from protagonist Annabel St. George's self-actualization to the comradeship of the American girls and the …

A Conversation With Velma Pollard, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Noted poet, novelist, linguist, and educator, Velma Pollard was Visiting Professor of English at the University of Richmond in Richmond, Virginia, during the fall semester of 2001 when I conducted the following interview. John Martin, my graduate assistant at the time, assisted me in videotaping and transcribing our conversation, which took place in her cottage at the University on December 3, 2001.

Whipping Up A Region : How The North Taught The South To Cook "Southern", Erin D. Bartels

Honors Theses

I will trace this progression toward the essentialization of southern cooking and therein southern identity by exploring cookbooks dealing with all or part of the South and ranging in years from 1877 to 1941.

A Following Sea : Charting Sea Imagery And Identity In Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John And Paule Marshall's Praisesong For The Widow, Melanie Clore

Master's Theses

In Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John and Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow, the sea incites a vital discourse on western influence, diasporic identity, and self-discovery. Both female protagonists, Annie John and Avey Johnson, purge their old identities and learn to embrace their cultural origins through the guidance, care, and persuasion of ancestral figures. The sea is not only a purifying agent, but also a catalyst for change as both women struggle to manage their multiple cultural influences, and achieve a unified, stable, independent self. The sea is also charged with socio-political controversy as colonization and tourism intrude upon the …

The Mill On The Floss, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

The Mill on the Floss was the second novel Marian Evans published under the pseudonym George Eliot. Born in 1819 to a prosperous estate manager, Marian Evans spent her youth much as her heroine did, in reading and outdoor activities. In 1850 Evans moved to London where she worked as a translator and editor, and fell in love with the writer and editor George Henry Lewes, a married man. Contemporary marriage law prevented Lewes from obtaining a divorce from his adulterous wife; the law held that, having condoned the adultery previously, he now had no grounds for divorce. Knowing this, …

"What Was I Created For, I Wonder?" : Occupation For Women In Shirley And Cranford, Julie Anne Tignor

Master's Theses

Charlotte Brontë's Shirley and Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford unite in asking and answering the question of what unmarried women were supposed to do with their time and talents in Victorian England, considering the constraints of both gentility and economic conditions. In writing these novels, Brontë and Gaskell joined mid-nineteenth century feminists such as Francis Power Cobbe and Florence Nightingale in discussing women's occupation. Cranford, rather than presenting the typical young unmarried woman as its heroine, features a community of old maids as its "heroines," revealing their story through the narration of Mary Smith. Shirley's Caroline Helstone examines the socially accepted …

[Introduction To] Growing Up In The South: An Anthology Of Modern Southern Literature, Suzanne W. Jones

Bookshelf

Something about the South has inspired the imaginations of an extraordinary number of America’s best storytellers—and greatest writers. That quality may be a rich, unequivocal sense of place, a living connection with the past, or the contradictions and passions that endow this region with awesome beauty and equally awesome tragedy. The stories in this superb collection of modern Southern writing are about childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood—in other words, about growing up in the South. Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” set in a South that remains segregated even after segregation is declared illegal, is the story of a …

Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life By Bruce King (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

In Another Life Derek Walcott wrote, "I had entered the house of literature as a houseboy"; Jamaican poet Mervyn Morris signified on this image in his The Pond when he declared, "And these are my rooms now." The journey that Walcott makes from "houseboy" to master/ruler/owner of the house of literature (the Nobel Laureate is frequently acclaimed the greatest poet writing in the English language) is painstakingly detailed in Bruce King's tome Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life.

Locating Postmodern Epistemology, Organizational Structure And Postcolonial Workers In The Knowledge Rhizome, Viren Mascarenhas

Honors Theses

The three excerpts from Amitav Ghosh's novels find the main characters speculating about the relationship between organizational structures, epistemology and knowledge production. In the first excerpt, Arjun tells Dinu that he does not believe that the colonial bureaucracy known as the British Anny will continue to exist if the policy of separating Indian and British officers persists. Anticipating the problems created from Indians holding leadership positions, he doubts that the British Anny "can go on." Murugan explains how the counter-scientists operate in the second excerpt, noting that members were revising epistemology by distorting knowledge through mutation. They were not following …

Escaping The Auction Block And Rejecting The Pedestal Of Virtue : Slave Narratives Redefine Womanhood In Nineteenth-Century America, Candice E. Renka

Honors Theses

The purpose of this paper is not, as Carby states, to "establish the existence of an American sisterhood between black and white women," an overly optimistic effort, of which Carby is rightfully wary. Rather, this understanding of womanhood as an ideology existing concordantly with slavery, reveals the limits of personhood as it was defined for women in antebellum America. Although the dominant paradigm of womanhood did not articulate White as a race, it was acutely aware of "whiteness ... as a racial categorization" in opposition to Blackness (Carby 18). Similarly, Black women were reconstructing womanhood, creating a model that empowered …

[Introduction To] From Within The Frame: Storytelling In African-American Studies, Bertram D. Ashe

Bookshelf

The book explores the written representation of African-American oral storytelling from Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison to James Alan McPherson, Toni Cade Bambara and John Edgar Wideman. At its core, the book compares the relationship of the "frame tale" - an inside-the-text storyteller telling a tale to an inside-the-text listener - with the relationship between the outside-the-text writer and reader. The progression is from Chesnutt's 1899 frame texts, in which the black spoken voice is contained by a white narrator/listener, to Bambara's sixties-era example of a "frameless" spoken voice text, to Wideman's neo-frame text of the late …

[Introduction To] From My People: 400 Years Of African American Folklore, Daryl Cumber Dance

Bookshelf

A magnificent celebration of―and an essential introduction to―African American life and culture. Folklore displays the heart and soul of a people. African American folklore not only hands down traditions and wisdom through the generations but also tells the history of a people banned from writing and reading during slavery. In this anthology, Daryl Cumber Dance collects a wealth of tales that have survived and been adapted over the years, many featuring characters (like Brer' Rabbit) from African culture. She leaves no genre of folklore out, including everything from proverbs and recipes to folk songs and rumor. There is a section …

I'Ll Take My Land: Contemporary Southern Agrarians, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

For many earlier southern white writers, the southern rural landscape was the repository of nostalgia for lost ways of life, whether it was the plantation fantasy that Thomas Nelson Page pined for in his stories In Ole Virginia (1887) or the segregated agrarian ideal that many contributors yearned for in I'll Take My Stand (1930). For modern southern white writers, beginning most prominently with William Faulkner, the rural landscape has conjured up unsettling guile about a way of life that flourished on the backs of the black people who tilled that land. And not surprisingly, for many black writers the …

Going To Nowhere : Narratives Of Patagonian Exploration, Mark W. Bell

Master's Theses

Since its discovery on Magellan's circumnavigation, Patagonia has been treated differently than any other region in the world. Effectively, Patagonia has been left empty or vacated by the North. But this emptiness and blankness have compulsively attracted curious travel writers who have filled the emptiness of Patagonia with self-reflexive projections. From Charles Darwin and W.H. Hudson to Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux, Northern commentators have found in Patagonia a landscape that accommodates their desire for self-reflexivity and self-consciousness. Thus, Patagonia has been simultaneously filled and evacuated by the Northern mind. As a result, Patagonia has become increasingly about the self …

Existential Freedom And Bad Faith : Exploring The "Infinite Possibilities" In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man And Jean-Paul Sartre's Being And Nothingness, Robert Aubrey Mawyer

Master's Theses

J. Saunders Redding comments that "Existentialism is no philosophy to accommodate the reality of Negro life" (209). However, Ralph Ellison's concern in Invisible Man to explore his protagonist's freedom and the ways in which he deceives himself about his freedom invites a comparison with the ontological premises of Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness, particularly his concept of "bad faith," in which individuals accept the identities that existing power structures force upon them. Both writers articulate the nature of selfhood in the modern world, and how easily one's true identity is lost when faced with absolute existential freedom. While Ellison …

Great Expectations, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

Great Expectations was the penultimate novel completed by the most popular novelist of Victorian England, Charles Dickens. Born in Kent, England, in 1812 to a family of modest means but great pretensions, Dickens’s early life was marked by both humiliation and ambition. Dickens never forgot the period of financial crisis during his childhood, when following his father’s bankruptcy, he was taken out of school and forced to work in a shoe-polish warehouse. While the episode was relatively brief, it marked Dickens’s later life in many ways: in the development of his own ambitions, in his sympathy for the poor and …

"Under The Umbrella Of Black Civilization": A Conversation With Reginald Mcknight, Bertram D. Ashe

English Faculty Publications

Talking to Reginald McKnight is like scanning an imaginary worldwide radio dial. At any given moment he can transform his pleasant speaking voice into a raspy, aged, Middle Eastern-by-way-of-New York accent - or a deep Southern drawl. In an instant he can switch from a precise West African dialect to hip, urban street lingo, and then effortlessly segue back to his normal voice. McKnight says he "hit the ground running" as a mimic, and his talent was broadened as he lived all over the United States as the son of an Air Force sergeant. His time spent on the road …

Wuthering Heights, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

Wuthering Heights is the only novel by Emily Brontë (1818-1848), one of three sisters who literary productions caused a minor sensation when they began appearing in the late 1840s. Born to Patrick Brontë, a Yorkshire clergyman, and his wife Maria, Emily, Anne, and Charlotte Brontë were precocious readers and writers. The three sisters spent years writing for their own pleasure and amusement, then published a volume of poetry in 1846. Fearing that the volume’s reception would be biased if the authors were known to be women, the sisters adopted the names Ellis (Emily), Acton (Anne), and Currer (Charlotte) Brontë. Their …

"Adjectives Of Mystery And Splendor": Byron And Romantic Religiousity, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

I will suggest that had the history of Christian metaphysics taken a different course than the one it did, it is likely that Byron's considerable objections to religion would have been diminished by at least one. About the particulars of Christian theology, he had little to say, his writings suggest a general discomfort with particular aspects of Christian metaphysics as they had developed by the nineteenth century.

An analysis of Byron's metaphysical/religious misgivings might serve to clarify the nature of his discontent, clearly showing that his particular "heresy" is radically distinct from others of the "Satanic school." It might also …

John Donne's Sacred Aesthetics And Protestant Eschatology In La Corona, Karen R. Knudson

Master's Theses

The operative figure for describing John Donne's religious poem, La Corona, is not a circle, as it has often been characterized, but a spiral. This figure incorporates the linear narrative and climax of the poem while maintaining the circularity of on-going spiritual experience. Scholars such as Patrick O'Connell and Elizabeth Hodgson are correct in viewing the poem as Donne's "ars poetica sacra" - his apologetic for the religious poet. But such scholars see either a climax and resolution for the speaker of La Corona or an unresolved question of his place as a poet. This paper argues that while …

Expressionist Playwrights From The Lost Generation : The Move Away From German Expressionism, Robert Andrew Ellis

Master's Theses

This thesis examines the use of Expressionism, and expressionist elements in the plays of four writers that were part of the Lost Generation. The thesis gives a brief history and definition of Expressionism. It also looks at the plays chronologically, and notes how the use of German Expressionism, present in the early works of Rice and Lawson, was discarded by the later authors in favor of the less-political elements of Expressionism that were originally developed by August Strindberg. Authors and plays include: Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine, John Howard Lawson's Roger Bloomer and Processional, Thomas Wolfe's Welcome to …

Stage Directions Uncovered : The Author's Voice In Modern English Drama, Erin Nelson

Honors Theses

The introduction of the modern director at the end of th4e nineteenth century had a major impact on both the role of dramatists in the theatrical process and the way they use stage directions within playscripts. This change will be demonstrated by a study of the way English-speaking dramatists make their intentions known through the scripted stage directions, or didascaliae, in dramatic texts.

Uncertain Identities : Aristocratic Women Of English Renaissance Drama, Kimberly Ann Turner

Master's Theses

Often, women stand out as being some of the most interesting and ambiguous characters in English drama. In this study, I examine moments in five Renaissance plays in which female characters reject the extreme dichotomies that were used by society to describe women. In the first portion of the paper, I look at the ways in which malcontents are similar to unconventional female characters in that they both challenge existing patriarchal structures. Secondly, I explore the characters of Mellida, Sophonisba, and Desdemona who begin to assert their own desires, while at the same time, they continue to embody more traditional …

The Colored Girl In The Ring: A Guyanese Woman Remembers By Brenda Chester Doharris (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Brenda Chester DoHarris's The Colored Girl in the Ring: A Guyanese Woman Remembers joins the company of some of the most memorable works of Caribbean literature, those classic accounts of coming-of-age, such as George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin, V. S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas, Michael Anthony's The Year in San Fernando, Merle Hodge's Crick Crack, Monkey, Erna Brodber's Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, Zea Edgell's Beka Lamb, Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John, and Beryl Gilroy's Sunlight on Sweet Water. Like most of the bildungsromans - and …

"Fellow-Craftsmen" : A Study Of The Personal And Professional Relationship Between Mary Johnston And Ellen Glasgow, Catherine G. Costantino

Master's Theses

Biographers and critics tend to vary widely on the attention given to the personal, intellectual, and literary significance of the friendship between Ellen Glasgow and Mary Johnston. In this thesis, the author argues that the two women, obviously drawn together because of personal and professional similarities, shared intellectual interests, a passion for writing, and certainly nurtured each other's creativity. By providing extensive evidence from Mary Johnston's unpublished diaries, notebooks, and journals, as well evidence from the abundance of published and unpublished correspondence between the two women, this thesis refutes past critical assessments and establishes that the relationship between Glasgow and …

My Brother By Jamaica Kincaid (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

In Jamaica Kincaid's six previous autobiographical novels and essays (At the Bottom of the River, 1984; Annie John, 1985; A Small Place, 1988; Annie, Gwen, Lily, Pam and Julie, 1989; Lucy, 1990; and The Autobiography of My Mother, 1996), her readers have the feeling that she has told all about her troubled life in Antigua and her painful emotional conflicts with her family (especially her mother). We discover with her new memoir, My Brother, however, that some things have been just too painful to tell - until now. Clearly the most obvious …

Romantic Agonies: Human Suffering And The Ethical Sublime, Terryl Givens, Anthony P. Russell

English Faculty Publications

This essay examines two poems depicting human anguish in order to explore a current in Romantic thought that implicitly yields some original and compelling insights regarding the problematic relationship between art and suffering. The focus is primarily on Wordsworth's narrative of Margaret's suffering in The Excursion, then more briefly on Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. In both cases Kant's ideas about the sublime provide us with a useful perspective from which to understand the issues these poems raise.

[Introduction To] Honey, Hush! An Anthology Of African American Women's Humor, Daryl Cumber Dance

Bookshelf

The vibrant humor of African American women is celebrated in this bold and unique collection that the Miami Herald describes as "breathtakingly broad and deep."

In this "dazzling anthology" (Publishers Weekly), Daryl Cumber Dance has collected the often hard-hitting, sometimes risqué, always dramatic humor that arises from the depth of black women's souls and the breadth of their lives. The eloquent wit and laughter of African American women are presented here in all their written and spoken manifestations: autobiographies, novels, essays, poems, speeches, comic routines, proverbial sayings, cartoons, mimeographed sheets, and folk tales. The chapters proceed thematically, covering …